Using the site

Who runs this place? Why should I put my stuff here? I have Søren Kierkegaard-style trust issues.

I am sorry to hear about your trust issues. You can read all about the people behind Anthologica on the Site Staff page. Anthologica is designed to provide a central, easy-to-use common meeting place for conlangers and conworlders, to promote the exchange of ideas and showcase their work. As of this writing, the majority of conworlding activity is carried out on forums and wikis that are not well-suited to managing the idiosyncracies of language and world description, so we endeavour to improve that by providing integrated, specialized tools wherever possible. (Also you don have to update anything on your own site!) Not convinced? Check out Testiverse, a demonstration universe.

Anthologica is funded out-of-pocket as a hobbyist project; it is entirely free of advertising and panhandling. While the core site staff is rather small (just one person so far!) the project has always been a community effort, and a great deal of user feedback has gone into development. In the event that its present hosting situation is unable to continue, it will be passed on to a technically competent, like-minded individual, and if no one can take up the responsibility, sanitized database dumps will be made available.

Getting started

There are a few key steps to getting yourself entrenched here:

1. Register! The process is painless and doesn't require CAPTCHAs or e-mail verification. (Yet, anyway.)
2. Set up your user profile. This will allow people to find you easily and is necessary for things like having an avatar. Having a unique avatar is strongly encouraged, as avatars appear throughout the site and are relied upon more heavily than most sites' avatars.
3. Post in the forums! No one will bite, and it's a great way to tell everyone you're here.
4. Set up your very own Universe. If you only want to work on a single isolated conlang project (such as an auxlang), you can also use one of the Public Universes, such as Miscellanea.
5. Create a dictionary and add words! Hint: use the Dictionary Importer to add many words quickly.

Formatting text

While you can use full HTML in larger wiki pages, most of the site uses WF Markup syntax. (You can see a cheat sheet here, which now includes emoticons.) WF Markup is designed to be a compact, easy-to-remember compromise between MediaWiki markup and BBcode that doesn't interfere with standard linguistic notations such as *unattested roots. WF Markup can be used in messages, descriptions, forum posts, comments, dictionary definitions, and just about anywhere else you can enter text.

In the future, we may support MediaWiki markup as another alternative for wiki articles, to facilitate migration, although the complexity of the MediaWiki parser means that this will be a considerable undertaking. Update: if you really, truly yearn for something sorta wiki-like, check out Wikka Markup Guide for information on our recently-added Wikka formatting support.